Henry Spencer takes a look at the increasingly public problems with NASA’s Ares I and Ares V boosters, which are designed to carry the agency’s new Orion spacecraft to Earth orbit and the moon, respectively.
NASA thought it could easily adapt legacy shuttle hardware to the task. Not so much. Considerable upgrades were required, especially after Orion began to gain weight. That, in turn, caused the weight and cost of the rocket to grow as the schedule slipped. Meanwhile, Ares V might not be as cost effective to fly as NASA has stated.
Spencer believes that NASA’s savior could be its investment in the COTS program, which is providing funding to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop commercial transportation to the International Space Station. SpaceX is developing a human and cargo-rated versions of its Dragon spacecraft, which Musk says could also fly to the moon. Orbital’s program is building a robotic freighter.
“If COTS works out well and Ares continues to blunder on, I expect that Congress will quickly run out of patience and force NASA’s hand by cutting off Ares funding,” Spencer writes.
“The one ray of hope for NASA is that with the White House about to change hands, there will almost certainly be a new NASA administrator next year. Immediately upon assuming office, he or she might declare the Ares programme a write-off and order a major change of direction, blaming the problems on the previous administration. But this would have to be done quickly, while it’s still plausible to blame his or her predecessor.”
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